The Ultimate Revelation Of Honey | UPSC
HEADLINES:
The honey industry and its bittersweet reality
WHY IN NEWS:
What does ‘pure honey’ mean and why does the recent report flagging adulteration by popular brands matter?
SYLLABUS COVERED: GS 3: Adulteration
LEARNING:
For PRELIMS go through important tests and quality parameters .
For MAINS you must focus on what are the consequences of adulteration in honey ? Let us dive in !
ISSUE:
- It reported that products by many popular brands were not honey, and, in fact, had been spiked with added sugar.
- Therefore, they ought not to be branded and sold as honey.
- The CSE also showed that adulteration technology had become sophisticated.
- There were commercial products available which are designed to cheat the tests that Indian food testing laboratories conduct to ascertain the purity of honey.
SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH
IS THERE ANYTHING CALLED ‘PURE HONEY’?
- Over millennia, ‘honey’ was what bees made from plant nectar.
- People only just squeezed out the contents of honey combs, scrubbed it clean of bees, pollen and other visible residues.
- This is honey that is either sourced from wild bees or domesticated bees in apiaries.
- However, none of this constitutes ‘pure honey’, because it is a marketing term and a superficial phrase that masks the complexity that is ‘honey’.
- Nowhere does one find the term ‘pure honey’ in it.
- However, given that the adulteration of honey with added sugar is a global problem, the regulations listed the chemical contents.
SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH
- Tolerable limits of ‘impurities’ that must be detected by specific tests for a batch of honey presented by a company for labelling to earn the right to market its product as honey.
- Or else ‘Honeydew’, which comes mainly from excretions of plant-sucking insects (Hemiptera) on the living parts of plants.
- The honey that is ultimately made available can be a combination of these and can differ widely in ‘honey profiles’.
- There are at least 300 recognised types of honey.
HOW IS HONEY TESTED?
- Honey is primarily a complex of the fructose, glucose and sucrose sugars.
- The latter also breaks down less easily. Laboratory tests determine acceptable ratios of these sugars and tolerance limits.
- HMF is actually toxic for bees.
- The reason a wide range of chemical variety is allowed is because different flowers have varying characteristics of nectar .
- This expresses different chemical compounds that are sensitive to light, temperature and geography.
- Therefore, it is possible to have raw honey that may be less sweet or high on sucrose, or is lighter or darker.
- The most common are the so-called C4 and C3 tests, that determine if sugar from corn, sugarcane or rice was used to adulterate honey.
SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH
- Then, there are minimal levels of pollen count and foreign oligosaccharides that a quantity of honey must have.
- All of these have a broad tolerance range and are also influenced by the laboratory tests employed to detect them.
- But whether this makes the honey ‘raw’ is an open question. In all, there are 18 parameters for a product to be certified as honey.
IASbhai WINDUP:
WHY DOES SPIKED HONEY MATTER?
- Honey typifies ‘natural sweetness’.
- The enzymes that bees use to make honey out of plant nectar render it rich in antioxidants, amino acids and other products that give honey its medicinal properties.
- This is why honey is part of traditional medicine and has been promoted as an immune system stimulant, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The addition of artificial sugar syrups reduces the concentration of these elements per gram of honey.
- Therefore, responsibly sourced honey poses similar risks to diabetics as ordinary sugar.
SOURCES: THE HINDU | The Ultimate Revelation Of Honey | UPSC

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